12th Annual Pinot Noir Shootout and Summit Results

Results of the 12th Annual Pinot Noir Shootout and Summit herePinot Noir, the most exciting, confounding, and challenging wine there is has been the focus of the Pinot Noir Shootout and Summit for 12 years. We never tire of tasting these wines, enjoying old friends and discovering new ones.

In this, the 12th Annual Pinot Noir Shootout, the Affairs of the Vine professional judging panel tasted 447 Pinot Noirs from all over the globe. Many of the wines we taste continue to delight and fascinate us. Those will be noted here. Every year we find outstanding examples of Pinot Noir from wineries that we know and we’re often pleasantly surprised by wines submitted from producers new to us.

The Pinot Noir Shootout is the most comprehensive and focused tasting of Pinot Noir in the U.S. The judging panel, an incredibly diverse panel of 46 wine professionals, tasted 440+ wines over a three-month period. Just 32 wines are tasted by the experts per day, allowing the judges to be completely immersed, focused and fair to the wines. Palate fatigue is not a factor in our tastings. The wines are tasted completely blind without reference to appellation, vintage or price. Each wine submitted to the Pinot Noir Shootout was tasted a minimum of twice. The top rated wines were then tasted by our panel of experts at the Pinot Noir Shootout Finals on January 4, 2014. Again, each judge was responsible for tasting, scoring, and analyzing only 32 wines.

Detailed notes accompany the scores. Gender counts…scores and comments are recorded separately and are posted on the Affairs of the Vine website for all wines of note.

The Pinot Noir Shootout is the only wine competition in which the judges’ conclusions are put to the test by a large unbiased group of wine lovers. 44 of the top-rated wines were featured at The 12th Annual Pinot Noir Summit on March 9, 2014 at at the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio.

At the Summit, over 400 adventurous Pinot Noir lovers, seeking true splendor in the glass, experienced and evaluated the 44 luscious Pinot Noirs in a blind tasting at the Pinot Noir Summit. The 44 wines represented some of the best wines from this year’s Pinot Noir Shootout. An additional 300 people joined the festivities for the Grand Awards Tasting on Sunday evening.

In a distinctly different format and atmosphere from other wine-tasting events, the attendees blind tasted the wines and pitted their palates against the expert judging panel. The wines were divided into 2 groups of 22 wines each (the Black Group and the Silver Group). The wines were dressed in Vino Sleeves and identified by a random color. The male and female votes were tallied separately.

After tasting the wines blind, the Wine Lovers at The Pinot Summit were given 5 chips (red for the women and blue for the men) and were invited to cast their votes for their favorite wines with the chips provided. They could vote for as many as 5 wines or as few as one, indicating their passion for each wine by the number of chips they dropped in the ballot box.

The Pinot Noir lovers spoke out loud and clear at the 12th Annual Pinot Noir Summit. In an unmistakable statement of preference, they embraced wines of elegance and varietal authenticity rather than burly Syrah-like Pinots, the muscular Pinot Noirs made popular by a few influential reviewers and their publications.

The Pinot Noir delegates agreed with the panel…the wines tasted were fantastic! The Pinot Noir Summit delegates however, did not rank the wines in the same order. Here are the winners as announced by Rusty Gaffney, the Prince of Pinot, on Sunday night, March 9th at the Grand Tasting Awards Ceremony.

The Male Wine Lovers did not select the same as the Male Judging panel. The Female Wine Lovers and Female Judges had only one wine in common in their top three. What does that prove? Who’s right? Who wins? Everybody!

I love the fact that there was such a diverse outcome – whether you’re an expert or a beginner, people like different things – and wine is about as subjective as it gets. My focus with Pinot tends to be the nose – sometimes it’s so good I forget to drink ! So even if it’s very nice on the palate, if there’s no intoxicating aroma to start with, it loses some points to me. To others, that’s just not as important.